Award-winning historian Marcus Rediker focuses on the high seas drama of the years 1716-1726, which featured the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard and the unnamed pegleg who was likely Robert Louis Stevenson’s model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
Villains of All Nations explores the “Golden Age” of Atlantic piracy and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates. It also becomes a warning to ship captains, wealthy merchants and governments.“Made up of all nations, and attacking the commerce of the world without respect for nation or property, pirates produced a strange and fascinating drama, an eighteenth-century morality play full of overlarge characters, complicated plots, twists and turns, and even unexpected outcomes.” The story of the Night Rambler becomes a yarn told among sailors and others who desire freedom. The mercenary pirate hunters are ready and waiting. The ship returns across the Atlantic to Caribbean. The rich and powerful finally decide enough is enough when John Gwin’s ship lands on the African coast and frees dozens of slaves being held for transport and sale in the American colonies. In a more personal aspect of the tale, it is revealed that one of the crew is a woman disguised as a man. The crew carries on, raiding merchant ships belonging to various corporate entities and rousing the fear and anger of the governments that those corporations conspire with. John Gwin is elected leader of the crew and they sail forth after freeing the human cargo under the name the Night Rambler.
The abuse of the crew by the Captain James Skinner forecasts the captain’s death and the takeover of the ship by its crew. The rest of the story involves a fugitive slave who fins himself an indentured sailor named John Gwin on a slave ship owned by the Royal African Company. The story here begins with the hanging of a pirate, who his fellows note remained defiant until the end.
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